With
cinema and advertising now being as close as chicken and egg, there is
only one question: which is the egg and which is the hen? This question
arises when encountering, at daybreak on a Monday morning, this
multi-Oscars thing: Out of Africa (1985). The thing, of course, has
become lengthy and deflated, and on television it loses a bit of the
bit of aura we once conceded to it. Out of Africa belongs to a true
“genre”: the movie-that-advertises-cinema, a genre suitable for the
Oscars and running on professionalism and nostalgic polishing (1). The
problem is that on television this genre doesn’t hold together. Or
rather, it returns to its starting point: advertising.This has
already been said. We have already listed with cruelty the products
“sold” by the movie (from the tropical cocktail to the airline
company). But cruelty is no longer enough and it must be possible to go
further (it is one of the reasons for this newspaper column). It is no
longer enough to acknowledge the incest between cinema and commercials;
one should ask at which point this incest is actually consummated. And
especially one should attempt the description of what the aesthetics of
advertising are like and of this world that commercials have immersed
us into for a long time.Out of Africa is one of these movies that
spends an hour just to set the decor and another hour to fit in this
decor a story so intimate and beautiful that it makes us “forget about
the decor”. What was typical of academic cinema has become the essence
of advertising. A television commercial fails if it has not been able
to set the decor. And because a commercial doesn’t last very long, it
must set up the decor quickly. As a monotonous succession of
“privileged moments”, Out of Africaah looks remotely like a movie, but
look closer and all its moments are built like commercials.And
there are only two kinds of commercials. Either there is a character
knowing more than another and signifying it to him (the trivial logic
of washing powder ads) or there are several characters uniting into a
third element, usually represented by music (the stylish logic based on
couples of surreal beauty). There are countless commercials of the
first kind in the first hour of Out of Africa. Discovering Kenya,
Baroness Blixen keeps meeting characters only there to help her “get an
idea”, judge by herself the quality of the product “Africa”. Every
scene therefore obeys one poor and monotonous pattern where the one who
knows demonstrates (or reveals) something to the one who doesn’t. These
are only power struggles - loosely filmed - and there isn’t one scene
which ends without a gain (of knowledge) for one and only one
character. At the beginning, Baroness Streep gets a lesson, then,
because she is feisty, she goes on to surprise everyone. In any case,
it is always unilateral.In the second part of the movie, the
commercials of the second kind, more modern, are dominating. The decor
is set and it is now about the burning love story linking the two stars
and the unforgettable moments they share. There, things become more
languid. The stars are supposed to merge with the greater whole of
Africa, something that would be totally impossible (one doesn’t “merge”
with a decor, one “stands out” from it) if it was not for the invention
of soundtrack and the birth of John Barry who composed this one. The
proof? When Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford) shows a sort of old
record player (“they have finally invented a useful machine”) by
playing Mozart in the bush, Pollack, instead of letting Mozart’s music
continue, covers it immediately with John Barry’s sound soup. What is
the point of soundtrack at this moment? Not to maintain the emotion of
the scene (Mozart would have been enough) but to signify (2) to the
spectator that there has been a moving moment.It is not surprising
then that the things that are difficult to film are purely and simply
avoided. When a director - even an estimable one like Pollack - has
digested so many advertising procedures, there are shots he no longer
knows how to direct. And when the Baroness kills a lion, we need at
least one slow motion to understand what happened. Sometimes a little
bit of “cinema” emerges, haphazardly. An angry lioness roars but then
goes away. A group of Masai soldiers cross the image without even
looking at the terrified white men. Friendly Masai, likeable lion and
useless extras: some beautiful shots.

(1) Jean-Claude Biette has
found an unbeatable expression to qualify this film genre: “filmed
cinema”. Havana by Pollack is the most recent example of this genre. It
is horrible.